that if an application that loaded a DLL crashes or is forced to terminate the DLL may remain in memory. COM DLLs do have use counts but it's up to the application to decrement the count when it's done with it. A good operating system should clean up after bad apps automatically, IMO.
Another problem has to do with security. DLLs and COMs advertise their data types through the use of variants so that a spying program can easily figure out why being transfered between various apps and DLLs.
The only property worthy of the name is tangible property. If you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Once it is released to the world, it belongs to nobody or to everybody. There are tens of millions of copies of Windows and MS Office being used freely around the world right now and there isn't a damn thing Microsoft can do about it. The Brazillian goverment in now using patented AIDS drugs to help AIDS victims without sending a cent to the patent holders. Information (ideas, music, software, formulas, inventions, writings, etc...) wants to be free and will be free. There is no stopping it.
IP owners must rely on powerful police states to force people to comply. Only big-brother type governments can enforce them. The only way to defeat IP laws is to copy it all, download it all and use it all for free! I especially recommend that all third world nations completely and immediately disregard all intellectual property laws that have kept them enslaved to the first world. We are one world sharing one planet. Let us share a little with our brothers and sisters. Let us stop being so damn selfish for just a little while.
You may ask, "what are artists, inventors and programmers going to do for a living?" My answer is that the system must be changed. What is everybody going to do when AI and advanced robotics replace everybody? We need a system based, not on labor, but on everybody being guaranteed an inheritance in the earth, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. What we do with our piece is up to us. Such a system would ensure a totally free market, the way it was supposed to be. No more slavery, no more sucking up to those who exploit us. Real freedom!
"You simply had to make it easier for people to program."
And a giant step it was back then. We all owe the original Fortran team a debt of gratitude. However, I think that the programming world could afford another giant step because it is still not easy for people to program. It still takes years of training and experience and the process is expensive, time consuming and prone to errors.
We won't be there until the average human being can put a sophisticated application together after just a few hours on a computer. We need powerful compositional software tools that allow us to throw pre-packaged components together simply by clicking and dragging. Software components should have plug-compatible connectors that can connect together automatically. Building a primitive component should be just as easy. It should all be message (data) and/or signal driven. Until then, software is still a primitive cottage industry that just limps along the best it knows how. My apologies to all the pioneers on whose shoulders we stand.
However quite an amount of failures is also hardware driven, rockets (challanger), ships, trains, airplanes, etc. only people find it much more hard to believe if an accident is caused by software, than by hardware. (or most of the cases human failures). From what I read in the news only a minority of accidents are coused by software.
You're kidding me? I am talking about things like microprocessors, ICs and logic circuits. How often does your computer hardware fail compared to the software it runs?
Might to be stupid, but designing an flexible, self changing cell logics, doing tasks, might not be easy. I know the today CPU architecture (called Neumann or?) is pretty much already taken as the wisdoms last words, it's not. But developing alternatives is fundamental research, and getting money (and brains) for this is difficult:)
There are a lot of researchers and engineers around the world hard at work designing reconfigurable, programmable active memories PAM). These memories are asynchronous processor arrays that are data (signal or event) driven as opposed to being clock driven. They are not only orders of magnitude faster than conventional processors, but they are also non-algorithmic: every active cell executes its instruction as soon as its data is ready. This is called event dirven or data-driven parallelism. It's analogous to the way the brain works. It's the future of computing, IMO.
Software engineering will come of age when programming languages no longer exist. All programming languages (Java, Lisp, C++, etc...) share a common charateistic. They are all based on a programming technique which was first pioneered by Lady Ada Lovelace more than a century ago: the algorithm. I am convinced that the algorithmic nature of software is the primary reason that computer applications are so unreliable and that software development is so time consuming and expensive.
It is a known fact that hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than software. The most obvious difference between software systems and hardware is that the former is algorithmic whereas the latter is based on parallel streams of signals.
A signal-based system is ideal for the implementation of work-once, work-always components that can snap together at the click of a mouse. This is because their temporal signatures remain constant. By contrast, one can never be sure when an algorithm will be done and this is detrimental to stability. Algorithms should thefore be implemented on top of a signal based system. They should not be the basis of automation. In the future we will have technologies that allow computer memories to instantly reconfigure themselves into parallel logic circuits. In the meantime, even though the Von Neuman paradigm forces sequentiality on us, signal flow parallelism can be easily emulated in software so as to hide the serial nature of processors from the application developper.
Unless computer scientists wake up from their algorithmic stupor, computer science will continue to limp along, badly. More multi-million dollar space probes will malfunction, airplanes will crash, electronic stock exchanges will suffer from glitches and airports will shut down. Half a century, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, we'll kick ourselves in the rear and ask ourselves "why have we been so damn stupid for so long?"
The problem with spacetime extrapolations like black holes, wormholes, etc... is that the physicists who come up with those theories have no clue as to the actual physical mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we abstractly refer to as spacetime curvature. They just know that things fall at a certain rate near massive bodies and that clocks slow down in a gravitational field. From that limited understanding, they feel they are knowledgeable enough to extrapolate all sorts of cockamamie and unfalsifiable theories that are only fit for star-trek episodes.
Kip "Wormhole" Thorne, Stephen Hawking & co claim that, according to their understanding of spacetime and relativity, it is possible to travel in time in principle. The amazing truth is that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition! Spacetime is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. So much so in fact that Sir Karl Popper compared Einstein's spacetime to "Parmenides' block universe" in which nothing ever changes. This says a lot about their supposed undertanding of spacetime, IMO. Time travel is pure crackpottery. If you are gullible enough to swallow physics from people who treat time travel as a worthy subject of physics, I've got a bridge to sell you.
a pair of glasses. Optically you just see a hi-res screen in full color. You could take it to bed with you and read it in total darkness without disturbing your sleeping partner. You could wear it in the bus or the train (not a good idea todrive while wearing it though). It might have a little clicker (wireless or not) that you can use to flip the "pages" , add bookmarks, notes, etc... You get the picture.
Until that happens, I'll continue to frequent my favorite antiquated, tree-consuming bookstore, thank you very much.
But how is this step any different from those we've seen thus far? This is not a paradigm shift, it's the reflection of the impact of technology and innovation on a process.
The revolutionary shift has to do with the fact that a book can now be archived electronically. With the aid of digital communication and file sharing technologies, it is now possible to copy and transmit an entire book almost instantly to someone half way around the world. And that's not all. It does not take any special sort of expertise to do so: the entire copying and transmission process can be done with just a few mouse clicks.
This changes things dramatically, in my opinion. It will have pronounced consequences not only in the continued viability and enforceability intellectual property laws but may also affect the financial livelihood of content authors and distributors, and the way they market their wares.
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds.
That would really be cool if they can pull it off. Every Slashdot user and anonymous coward should immediately write a check to those people. May the RIAA and other freedom destroyers tremble in fear! May they have horrible visions of empty bank accounts and past due legal bills! May their power to restrict the freedom of others dwindle exponentially! Go Freenet!
IP laws are unnatural. They can only be enforced with the use of powerful police states. Demand liberty! Nothing less!
Many countries are spending large amounts of their defence budgets designing stealthy aircraft
It would be much more impressive if Roke Manor Research could figure out a way to make war obsolete so we can concentrate instead on exploring the universe. Wouldn't it be something if countries did not have to spend any money at all on defence? Is there not a way for the world to organize itself so as to live in peace? I think there should be.
Oh OK. Sorry. I was daydreaming there for a second.
I'd compare port sacnning to wandering across that lawn and checking to see whether the doors and windows are locked. You might just be worried about my security and safety but see how far you get telling it to the police.
The way I look at it, if it's ok for the goverment to do it, it should be ok for the people to do it also. Is not the government supposed to serve the people in a democracy? Is a slave greater than his master?
How faithful can one be to the private property metaphor without getting into absurd comparisons? If port scanning is illegal, so should looking at someone's house, roof, lawn, doors, windows, etc...
Hint for futuristic article editors: the human brain has a hardware and software architecture that has absolutely nothing in common with that of an electronic computer.
In my opinion there is very little physical that cannot be emulated with computers, given enough processing speed and memory.
From Yahoo Dailynews: An investor could check his stock portfolio in the morning and find that the computer has analyzed the portfolio, market trends, economic data and such to present a number of options.
``You log on in the morning and (the computer) gives you two or three options: 'Have you thought about doing one of these things? I've done the calculations for you,''' Marcyk said.
If the computer is so smart, why not just tell it to initiate whatever stock transactions it thinks is best? Come to think of it, if computers are that smart, you'll be out of a job and you won't have any money to invest in stocks unless you inherited an estate or had some money stashed away from the time when you were working.
When that happens, we'll need a new law to replace Moore's law: the number of unemployed people will double every seven days. Andy Grove will be heard saying "Where is the limit? Show me the limit, goddamnit!" while an angry and hungry mob tries to force its way into the lobby of Intel's headquarters, brandishing pitchforks and God knows what else.:-D
Certainly the symbolic logic guys were wrong as wrong as those who thought neural nets would solve everything.
To claim that it is wrong to think that neural nets would solve everything is to ignore the evidence in my view. The truth is that the brain is a collection of neural nets feeding into and relying on one another. Each net has a specific role to perform. Sorry, but this sounds very much like neural nets solving everything to me. Maybe you had something else in mind.
And your implication that he is somehow holding back the field of AI is not too plausible, either. It's hardly as if he is controlling AI research all over the world. He's not even controlling AI research at MIT. If neural networks haven't yet taken over the world, you can hardly lay the blame at Marvin's doorstep.
It's a good thing that Dr. Minsky is not controlling AI research at MIT and elsewhere, although he tries. We do hear rumors of his close encounters with other AI researchers such as avant-guarde roboticist Rodney Brooks.
The symbolic AI camp has been at it since the fifties and they made a lot of noise over the years. They have failed miserably. Rather than lick their wounds and moving on to more fruitful endeavors, they continue to uphold their failed approach through various funded projects and obsolete AI curricula that are being taught at major universities and AI centers around the world.
The symbolic aproach is dead and should be buried once and for all, in my opinion. Ultimately it will be but a footnote in the history of AI. The future of AI belongs to connectionism, the only model that has a chance of taming the otherwise intractable complexity of animal intelligence. We need fundamental perceptual and motor learning principles. We need fundamental principles of motivation. Once we formulate these all important principles, we'll know how to apply them to billions of self-modifying cells working in parallel. Only then will human level intelligence become a reality. It will happen in our lifetime.
When you have emergent phenomena like consciousness
What evidence do you have that consciousness is emergent? I suggest we stick to the stuff (intelligence) we can observe (and somewhat quantify) and worry about consciousness later.
I'm no fan of old-school AI, but Minsky has a point -- people use genetic algorithms and neural nets to "learn" from examples, but such pattern matching tells us *nothing* about how learning really happens. They are just generic black boxes that people throw at data in the hope that something useful comes out.
I agree that the old ANN pattern recognition approach is a dead end. However, a lot has happened in neural networks in the last decade or so. We are learning a lot from neurobiology. We are learning that signal timing in biological networks are crucial to learning and motor skills. One of the important discoveries seems to be in the area of temporal correlations among spiking signals, i.e., determining whether signals are sequential or concurrent. If they are sequential, it appears (c.f. the work of Dr. Henry Markram et al) that the order of arrival is crucial. The time scale is on the order of miliseconds. The new spiking neural networks are so unlike the old ANNs that a new discipline has emerged, one which tries to distance itself from the old ANNers. It's called computational neuroscience (for those who don't keep up with progress in this area).
It is clear that AI hasn't delivered on the promises made over thirty years ago. What happened? In a preview of his upcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future development in the field.
I used to be a Minsky fan (I still have a copy of his "Society of Mind") but not anymore. Marvin Minsky is one of the reasons that AI still has not delivered on its promises. He is part of the old symbolic school of AI. He was the guy who, with Seymour Papert, wrote a scathing criticism of the then embryonic field of neural networks, effectively strangling research in neural networks for the better part of a decade. I am sure Dr. Minsky has had occasions to change his views since but I don't think he has anything to offer that will lead us to HAL. The following is a quote from a Scientific American article on Arthur C. Clarke's HAL.
The novel of 2001 explains how the HAL 9000 series developed out of work by Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another researcher in the 1980s that showed how "neural networks could be generated automatically--self-replicated--in accordance with an arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of the human brain." Ironically, Minsky, one of the pioneers of neural networks who was also an adviser to the filmmakers (and who almost got killed by a falling wrench on the set), says today that this approach should be relegated to a minor role in modeling intelligence, while criticizing the amount of research devoted to it. "There's only been a tiny bit of work on commonsense reasoning, and I could almost characterize the rest as various sorts of get-rich-quick schemes, like genetic algorithms [and neural networks] where you're hoping you won't have to
figure anything out," Minsky says.
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,". All along I'm thinking that intelligence is so complex and intractable that the most plausible solution to the problem of making a human-level AI is one where we let the AI emerge, grow and learn. IOW, what we really need to understand is the learning process, which encompasses perceptual, motivational and motor learning.
But here comes Marvin Minsky, a luminary in the AI community, insisting that figuring everything out is precisely what needs to be done. Haysoos Martinez! This is the main reason why we still don't have human-level AI! I think Minsky's stance is a disservice to computational neuroscience and ANN researchers everywhere.
The man has had his day in the sun. Now it's time for the younger generation of AI researchers to come in and say "hold it! we're taking a different approach from now on. The unkept promises of AI were made by the old symbolic AI crowd. There is a new school in town. The new AI neural, it's emergent, and it's gonna to kick ass!"
I agree. The only property worthy of the name is tangible property. If you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Once it is released to the world, it belongs to nobody or to everybody. There are tens of millions of copies of Windows and MS Office being used freely around the world right now and there isn't a damn thing Microsoft can do about it. The Brazillian goverment in now using patented AIDS drugs to cure AIDS victims without sending a cent to the patent holders. Information (ideas, music, software, inventions, writings, etc...) wants to be free. There is no stopping it.
IP laws are unnatural and IP owners must rely on powerful police states to force people to comply. Only big-brother type governments can enforce them. The only way to defeat IP laws is to copy it all and download it all!
You may ask, "What are artists, inventors and programmers going to do for a living?" My answer is that the system must be changed. What is everybody going to do when AI and advanced robotics replace everybody? We need a system based, not on labor, but on everybody being guaranteed an inheritance in the earth, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. What we do with our piece is up to us. Such a system would ensure a totally free market the way it was supposed to be. No more slavery, no more sucking up to those who exploit us. Real freedom.
The RIAA's power comes from the money they amass from the music-buying public. Don't buy their products and watch them wither. Download it all and copy it all! If you like an artist's work, send them a personal check.
The RIAA's power comes from the money they amass from the music-buying public. Without money, they are dead in the water. There is only one way to defeat them, don't buy their products. If you like an artist's work, send him/her a personal check instead.
Don't let them take away our remaining liberties a little bit at a time until there is none left. The internet is our weapon of self-defence. We must use it to fight all would-be enslavers. We must do everything we can to keep it free. Send them a message they will not soon forget. Show them who is really in charge.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't get on the site. In the meantime, can someone tell mean what they mean by "simultaneous multithreading?" It sounds somewhat redundant.
that if an application that loaded a DLL crashes or is forced to terminate the DLL may remain in memory. COM DLLs do have use counts but it's up to the application to decrement the count when it's done with it. A good operating system should clean up after bad apps automatically, IMO.
Another problem has to do with security. DLLs and COMs advertise their data types through the use of variants so that a spying program can easily figure out why being transfered between various apps and DLLs.
The only property worthy of the name is tangible property. If you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Once it is released to the world, it belongs to nobody or to everybody. There are tens of millions of copies of Windows and MS Office being used freely around the world right now and there isn't a damn thing Microsoft can do about it. The Brazillian goverment in now using patented AIDS drugs to help AIDS victims without sending a cent to the patent holders. Information (ideas, music, software, formulas, inventions, writings, etc...) wants to be free and will be free. There is no stopping it.
IP owners must rely on powerful police states to force people to comply. Only big-brother type governments can enforce them. The only way to defeat IP laws is to copy it all, download it all and use it all for free! I especially recommend that all third world nations completely and immediately disregard all intellectual property laws that have kept them enslaved to the first world. We are one world sharing one planet. Let us share a little with our brothers and sisters. Let us stop being so damn selfish for just a little while.
You may ask, "what are artists, inventors and programmers going to do for a living?" My answer is that the system must be changed. What is everybody going to do when AI and advanced robotics replace everybody? We need a system based, not on labor, but on everybody being guaranteed an inheritance in the earth, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. What we do with our piece is up to us. Such a system would ensure a totally free market, the way it was supposed to be. No more slavery, no more sucking up to those who exploit us. Real freedom!
Demand Liberty! Nothing less!
'Parallel algorithm' is an oxymoron. Think about it.
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Interesting=1, Funny=3, Overrated=2, Total=7.
Not what I would call a consensus. I had no idea this would be so controversial. I thank everyone for their replies even the negative ones.
"You simply had to make it easier for people to program."
And a giant step it was back then. We all owe the original Fortran team a debt of gratitude. However, I think that the programming world could afford another giant step because it is still not easy for people to program. It still takes years of training and experience and the process is expensive, time consuming and prone to errors.
We won't be there until the average human being can put a sophisticated application together after just a few hours on a computer. We need powerful compositional software tools that allow us to throw pre-packaged components together simply by clicking and dragging. Software components should have plug-compatible connectors that can connect together automatically. Building a primitive component should be just as easy. It should all be message (data) and/or signal driven. Until then, software is still a primitive cottage industry that just limps along the best it knows how. My apologies to all the pioneers on whose shoulders we stand.
However quite an amount of failures is also hardware driven, rockets (challanger), ships, trains, airplanes, etc. only people find it much more hard to believe if an accident is caused by software, than by hardware. (or most of the cases human failures). From what I read in the news only a minority of accidents are coused by software.
:)
You're kidding me? I am talking about things like microprocessors, ICs and logic circuits. How often does your computer hardware fail compared to the software it runs?
Might to be stupid, but designing an flexible, self changing cell logics, doing tasks, might not be easy. I know the today CPU architecture (called Neumann or?) is pretty much already taken as the wisdoms last words, it's not. But developing alternatives is fundamental research, and getting money (and brains) for this is difficult
There are a lot of researchers and engineers around the world hard at work designing reconfigurable, programmable active memories PAM). These memories are asynchronous processor arrays that are data (signal or event) driven as opposed to being clock driven. They are not only orders of magnitude faster than conventional processors, but they are also non-algorithmic: every active cell executes its instruction as soon as its data is ready. This is called event dirven or data-driven parallelism. It's analogous to the way the brain works. It's the future of computing, IMO.
Software engineering will come of age when programming languages no longer exist. All programming languages (Java, Lisp, C++, etc...) share a common charateistic. They are all based on a programming technique which was first pioneered by Lady Ada Lovelace more than a century ago: the algorithm. I am convinced that the algorithmic nature of software is the primary reason that computer applications are so unreliable and that software development is so time consuming and expensive.
It is a known fact that hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than software. The most obvious difference between software systems and hardware is that the former is algorithmic whereas the latter is based on parallel streams of signals.
A signal-based system is ideal for the implementation of work-once, work-always components that can snap together at the click of a mouse. This is because their temporal signatures remain constant. By contrast, one can never be sure when an algorithm will be done and this is detrimental to stability. Algorithms should thefore be implemented on top of a signal based system. They should not be the basis of automation. In the future we will have technologies that allow computer memories to instantly reconfigure themselves into parallel logic circuits. In the meantime, even though the Von Neuman paradigm forces sequentiality on us, signal flow parallelism can be easily emulated in software so as to hide the serial nature of processors from the application developper.
Unless computer scientists wake up from their algorithmic stupor, computer science will continue to limp along, badly. More multi-million dollar space probes will malfunction, airplanes will crash, electronic stock exchanges will suffer from glitches and airports will shut down. Half a century, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, we'll kick ourselves in the rear and ask ourselves "why have we been so damn stupid for so long?"
The problem with spacetime extrapolations like black holes, wormholes, etc... is that the physicists who come up with those theories have no clue as to the actual physical mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we abstractly refer to as spacetime curvature. They just know that things fall at a certain rate near massive bodies and that clocks slow down in a gravitational field. From that limited understanding, they feel they are knowledgeable enough to extrapolate all sorts of cockamamie and unfalsifiable theories that are only fit for star-trek episodes.
Kip "Wormhole" Thorne, Stephen Hawking & co claim that, according to their understanding of spacetime and relativity, it is possible to travel in time in principle. The amazing truth is that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition! Spacetime is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. So much so in fact that Sir Karl Popper compared Einstein's spacetime to "Parmenides' block universe" in which nothing ever changes. This says a lot about their supposed undertanding of spacetime, IMO. Time travel is pure crackpottery. If you are gullible enough to swallow physics from people who treat time travel as a worthy subject of physics, I've got a bridge to sell you.
a pair of glasses. Optically you just see a hi-res screen in full color. You could take it to bed with you and read it in total darkness without disturbing your sleeping partner. You could wear it in the bus or the train (not a good idea todrive while wearing it though). It might have a little clicker (wireless or not) that you can use to flip the "pages" , add bookmarks, notes, etc... You get the picture.
Until that happens, I'll continue to frequent my favorite antiquated, tree-consuming bookstore, thank you very much.
But how is this step any different from those we've seen thus far? This is not a paradigm shift, it's the reflection of the impact of technology and innovation on a process.
The revolutionary shift has to do with the fact that a book can now be archived electronically. With the aid of digital communication and file sharing technologies, it is now possible to copy and transmit an entire book almost instantly to someone half way around the world. And that's not all. It does not take any special sort of expertise to do so: the entire copying and transmission process can be done with just a few mouse clicks.
This changes things dramatically, in my opinion. It will have pronounced consequences not only in the continued viability and enforceability intellectual property laws but may also affect the financial livelihood of content authors and distributors, and the way they market their wares.
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds.
That would really be cool if they can pull it off. Every Slashdot user and anonymous coward should immediately write a check to those people. May the RIAA and other freedom destroyers tremble in fear! May they have horrible visions of empty bank accounts and past due legal bills! May their power to restrict the freedom of others dwindle exponentially! Go Freenet!
IP laws are unnatural. They can only be enforced with the use of powerful police states. Demand liberty! Nothing less!
Many countries are spending large amounts of their defence budgets designing stealthy aircraft
It would be much more impressive if Roke Manor Research could figure out a way to make war obsolete so we can concentrate instead on exploring the universe. Wouldn't it be something if countries did not have to spend any money at all on defence? Is there not a way for the world to organize itself so as to live in peace? I think there should be.
Oh OK. Sorry. I was daydreaming there for a second.
I'd compare port sacnning to wandering across that lawn and checking to see whether the doors and windows are locked. You might just be worried about my security and safety but see how far you get telling it to the police.
The way I look at it, if it's ok for the goverment to do it, it should be ok for the people to do it also. Is not the government supposed to serve the people in a democracy? Is a slave greater than his master?
How faithful can one be to the private property metaphor without getting into absurd comparisons? If port scanning is illegal, so should looking at someone's house, roof, lawn, doors, windows, etc...
Hint for futuristic article editors: the human brain has a hardware and software architecture that has absolutely nothing in common with that of an electronic computer.
In my opinion there is very little physical that cannot be emulated with computers, given enough processing speed and memory.
From Yahoo Dailynews: An investor could check his stock portfolio in the morning and find that the computer has analyzed the portfolio, market trends, economic data and such to present a number of options.
:-D
``You log on in the morning and (the computer) gives you two or three options: 'Have you thought about doing one of these things? I've done the calculations for you,''' Marcyk said.
If the computer is so smart, why not just tell it to initiate whatever stock transactions it thinks is best? Come to think of it, if computers are that smart, you'll be out of a job and you won't have any money to invest in stocks unless you inherited an estate or had some money stashed away from the time when you were working.
When that happens, we'll need a new law to replace Moore's law: the number of unemployed people will double every seven days. Andy Grove will be heard saying "Where is the limit? Show me the limit, goddamnit!" while an angry and hungry mob tries to force its way into the lobby of Intel's headquarters, brandishing pitchforks and God knows what else.
Certainly the symbolic logic guys were wrong as wrong as those who thought neural nets would solve everything.
To claim that it is wrong to think that neural nets would solve everything is to ignore the evidence in my view. The truth is that the brain is a collection of neural nets feeding into and relying on one another. Each net has a specific role to perform. Sorry, but this sounds very much like neural nets solving everything to me. Maybe you had something else in mind.
And your implication that he is somehow holding back the field of AI is not too plausible, either. It's hardly as if he is controlling AI research all over the world. He's not even controlling AI research at MIT. If neural networks haven't yet taken over the world, you can hardly lay the blame at Marvin's doorstep.
It's a good thing that Dr. Minsky is not controlling AI research at MIT and elsewhere, although he tries. We do hear rumors of his close encounters with other AI researchers such as avant-guarde roboticist Rodney Brooks.
The symbolic AI camp has been at it since the fifties and they made a lot of noise over the years. They have failed miserably. Rather than lick their wounds and moving on to more fruitful endeavors, they continue to uphold their failed approach through various funded projects and obsolete AI curricula that are being taught at major universities and AI centers around the world.
The symbolic aproach is dead and should be buried once and for all, in my opinion. Ultimately it will be but a footnote in the history of AI. The future of AI belongs to connectionism, the only model that has a chance of taming the otherwise intractable complexity of animal intelligence. We need fundamental perceptual and motor learning principles. We need fundamental principles of motivation. Once we formulate these all important principles, we'll know how to apply them to billions of self-modifying cells working in parallel. Only then will human level intelligence become a reality. It will happen in our lifetime.
When you have emergent phenomena like consciousness
What evidence do you have that consciousness is emergent? I suggest we stick to the stuff (intelligence) we can observe (and somewhat quantify) and worry about consciousness later.
I'm no fan of old-school AI, but Minsky has a point -- people use genetic algorithms and neural nets to "learn" from examples, but such pattern matching tells us *nothing* about how learning really happens. They are just generic black boxes that people throw at data in the hope that something useful comes out.
I agree that the old ANN pattern recognition approach is a dead end. However, a lot has happened in neural networks in the last decade or so. We are learning a lot from neurobiology. We are learning that signal timing in biological networks are crucial to learning and motor skills. One of the important discoveries seems to be in the area of temporal correlations among spiking signals, i.e., determining whether signals are sequential or concurrent. If they are sequential, it appears (c.f. the work of Dr. Henry Markram et al) that the order of arrival is crucial. The time scale is on the order of miliseconds. The new spiking neural networks are so unlike the old ANNs that a new discipline has emerged, one which tries to distance itself from the old ANNers. It's called computational neuroscience (for those who don't keep up with progress in this area).
It is clear that AI hasn't delivered on the promises made over thirty years ago. What happened? In a preview of his upcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future development in the field.
I used to be a Minsky fan (I still have a copy of his "Society of Mind") but not anymore. Marvin Minsky is one of the reasons that AI still has not delivered on its promises. He is part of the old symbolic school of AI. He was the guy who, with Seymour Papert, wrote a scathing criticism of the then embryonic field of neural networks, effectively strangling research in neural networks for the better part of a decade. I am sure Dr. Minsky has had occasions to change his views since but I don't think he has anything to offer that will lead us to HAL. The following is a quote from a Scientific American article on Arthur C. Clarke's HAL.
The novel of 2001 explains how the HAL 9000 series developed out of work by Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another researcher in the 1980s that showed how "neural networks could be generated automatically--self-replicated--in accordance with an arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of the human brain." Ironically, Minsky, one of the pioneers of neural networks who was also an adviser to the filmmakers (and who almost got killed by a falling wrench on the set), says today that this approach should be relegated to a minor role in modeling intelligence, while criticizing the amount of research devoted to it. "There's only been a tiny bit of work on commonsense reasoning, and I could almost characterize the rest as various sorts of get-rich-quick schemes, like genetic algorithms [and neural networks] where you're hoping you won't have to
figure anything out," Minsky says.
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,". All along I'm thinking that intelligence is so complex and intractable that the most plausible solution to the problem of making a human-level AI is one where we let the AI emerge, grow and learn. IOW, what we really need to understand is the learning process, which encompasses perceptual, motivational and motor learning.
But here comes Marvin Minsky, a luminary in the AI community, insisting that figuring everything out is precisely what needs to be done. Haysoos Martinez! This is the main reason why we still don't have human-level AI! I think Minsky's stance is a disservice to computational neuroscience and ANN researchers everywhere.
The man has had his day in the sun. Now it's time for the younger generation of AI researchers to come in and say "hold it! we're taking a different approach from now on. The unkept promises of AI were made by the old symbolic AI crowd. There is a new school in town. The new AI neural, it's emergent, and it's gonna to kick ass!"
All multimedia should be set free.
I agree. The only property worthy of the name is tangible property. If you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Once it is released to the world, it belongs to nobody or to everybody. There are tens of millions of copies of Windows and MS Office being used freely around the world right now and there isn't a damn thing Microsoft can do about it. The Brazillian goverment in now using patented AIDS drugs to cure AIDS victims without sending a cent to the patent holders. Information (ideas, music, software, inventions, writings, etc...) wants to be free. There is no stopping it.
IP laws are unnatural and IP owners must rely on powerful police states to force people to comply. Only big-brother type governments can enforce them. The only way to defeat IP laws is to copy it all and download it all!
You may ask, "What are artists, inventors and programmers going to do for a living?" My answer is that the system must be changed. What is everybody going to do when AI and advanced robotics replace everybody? We need a system based, not on labor, but on everybody being guaranteed an inheritance in the earth, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. What we do with our piece is up to us. Such a system would ensure a totally free market the way it was supposed to be. No more slavery, no more sucking up to those who exploit us. Real freedom.
Demand Liberty! Nothing less!
The RIAA's power comes from the money they amass from the music-buying public. Don't buy their products and watch them wither. Download it all and copy it all! If you like an artist's work, send them a personal check.
The RIAA's power comes from the money they amass from the music-buying public. Without money, they are dead in the water. There is only one way to defeat them, don't buy their products. If you like an artist's work, send him/her a personal check instead.
Don't let them take away our remaining liberties a little bit at a time until there is none left. The internet is our weapon of self-defence. We must use it to fight all would-be enslavers. We must do everything we can to keep it free. Send them a message they will not soon forget. Show them who is really in charge.
Download it all and copy it all!
Demand liberty! Nothing less!